The word “rape” does not appear once in “Promising Young Woman.” Women “put themselves in danger.” They’re “asking for it,” and anyone could “take advantage.” A rape is “what happened.” It’s “unusual circumstances,” “the accusations,” “a he-said, she-said situation,” the inevitable result of “a bad choice.” These euphemisms, like all clichés, have been repeated until they have lost all meaning, stones turned smooth by a river.
We don’t need the word itself, of course, to see what’s going on. “Promising Young Woman,” the directorial début of Emerald Fennell, who was the showrunner for the second season of “Killing Eve,” is steeped in sexual violence: the ubiquity of it, the way that it can be tedious and life-destroying in turn. The movie, which was released in theatres on Christmas and came to streaming on January 15th, centers on a med-school dropout named Cassie—a flinty, inscrutable Carey Mulligan—who works in a coffee shop, lives with her parents, and spends her nights going to bars and night clubs and pretending to be dangerously, blindly intoxicated. (Be warned: this piece will delve into its twisty plot in detail.) When men take her back to their places—under the pretense of helping her—she rejects their advances, begs to go home, and then, when they persist, switches off the slurring and asks, in a cold and sober voice, what they are doing. It’s startling enough that they always immediately backpedal. “I thought we had a connection,” one sputters. “I’m a nice guy!” Afterward, she goes home, tallies each conquest in a small notebook hidden under her childhood bed, and the next morning begins the whole process over again. All of this—her strange, stalled existence, her brazen vigilantism, the depression that has hollowed her from the inside out—stems from the loss of her best friend, Nina, who committed suicide (a word that is never explicitly used to describe her death) after being publicly raped at a party, when she and Cassie were in medical school together.
Then, after running into a former classmate, Ryan (Bo Burnham), and learning that Nina’s rapist has returned from abroad and is about to get married, Cassie recalibrates her retributive ritual. She shifts her sights from her run-of-the-mill targets—finance bros, goofy wannabe novelists, fedora-festooned putzes—to Nina’s rapist and his enablers: the men who watched without intervening, the lawyer who bullied Nina into silence, the friend who thought Nina was “crying wolf,” the dean who swept everything under the rug. (Those last two are women.) In the meantime, a romance with Ryan blossoms, and Cassie begins to wonder whether she should move on with her arrested life or finish punishing those who arrested it.
It is crucial to the story of “Promising Young Woman” that guilt is not limited to Nina’s rapist—indeed, it is nearly ubiquitous, shared by all of the movie’s male characters. In a master stroke of casting, Fennell, along with the casting directors Mary Vernieu and Lindsay Graham-Ahanonu, filled the movie with “likeable beta comedy darlings,” as the writer Arielle Brousse noted, on Twitter, “so that you can feel decades of socialization pulling you in the direction of ‘he can’t be THAT big a threat! It’s probably a misunderstanding.’ ” There is something genuinely unnerving about watching people test their own willingness to rape someone as though they were inching into a cold pool, or commit to its no-big-deal-ness like someone doing a cannonball. Ryan, with his banter and charm and the tallness that people often confuse for good looks, is guilty, too: Cassie will eventually learn that he witnessed Nina’s rape and did nothing. Even “Midsommar,” one of my favorite recent revenge movies with a plot built atop the fault lines of gender, couldn’t resist having a single good guy in the middle of its cornucopia of comeuppance—a preëmptive strike, perhaps, against those who would accuse it of making sweeping statements about men as a category. But there is no such coddling in “Promising Young Woman,” and this lack of hedging feels both furious and maddeningly correct. There’s a reason Cassie is called a crazy fucking bitch, a psycho, by the men of the film. One of her targets, at a moment of extreme vulnerability, can’t help himself. “You’re insane,” he tells her. She replies, with a laugh, “You know what, I honestly don’t think I am.” And I think she’s right. She has the clarity and prophecy of her priestess namesake; it’s not her fault that no one is listening.
Cassie, through much of the film, is styled like a shepherdess, all pastels and flower prints and braids and ribbons—in one shot, a saint’s halo of crown molding circles her head—except when she’s hunting, and the palette becomes lurid. This is not a particularly subtle gesture, but, then, the rape-revenge film, the genre to which “Promising Young Woman” belongs, is not a particularly subtle genre. It is, however, a genre rife with moral complications and high-stakes cinematic choices. Does one, for instance, depict the rape, and risk the scene being titillating or exploitative? Or does one show very little, and risk the revenge seeming hysterical or overblown? Do you nudge audience members to identify with the rapist, so that they experience complicity—or with the victim, so that they feel sympathy? As viewers, we have our own questions to ask. Do filmmakers owe us realistic portrayals of rape and its aftermath, or may we take pleasure in revenge fantasies, in which real-life obstacles are cast aside?
“If there is a broader cultural confusion regarding how to tackle rape-revenge films,” Alexandra Heller-Nicholas wrote, in a critical study of the genre published a decade ago, “it is because the films themselves reflect a broader cultural confusion about rape more generally.” It is not surprising, then, that “Promising Young Woman,” despite receiving a number of positive reviews, is an unusually divisive movie: critics have lamented its cynicism, its rejection of realism, its supposed lack of anything sufficiently “new.” Many of these verdicts raise the questions that are inherent to the genre and its subject matter—whether cynicism is appropriate, whether realism is necessary or catharsis a requirement. But it’s the idea of newness that I keep returning to, how recognizing the movie’s relationship with its forebears is crucial to seeing the dimensions of its ambition.
One could spend paragraphs listing the allusions in “Promising Young Woman” to its predecessors in the genre. There is a visual motif provided by a necklace, a seeming reference to Wes Craven’s “The Last House on the Left,” from 1972. The film’s central ride-or-die friendship invokes both “Thelma & Louise” and “Baise-moi.” Its kinky-scenario-as-cover-for-revenge plot calls to mind “Descent.” Its use of religious iconography echoes “I Spit on Your Grave,” “Thriller: A Cruel Picture,” and “Ms. 45.”
But the movie also departs from these films at key points, with a constellation of purposeful choices. The rape itself is not shown; Fennell resists the genre’s tendency to revel, often at great length, in horrifying depictions of sexual violence. The crime at the center of “Promising Young Woman” is, like most rapes, but unlike most of those that happen in these films, committed by someone who knows the victim.
Then there’s the movie’s variation on the proxy avenger. There are, broadly speaking, two kinds of rape-revenge films, as Sarah Projansky notes in her book “Watching Rape.” There are those in which “women face rape, recognize that the law will neither protect nor avenge them, and then take the law into their own hands.” And there are those in which a grieving boyfriend or husband or parents avenge the violation of a wronged woman who is, essentially, a non-character. In these latter movies, Projansky writes, the crime often serves as the excuse to indulge in “a particularly violent version of masculinity.” Ingmar Bergman’s “The Virgin Spring,” in which a father brutally slaughters a trio of men who raped and killed his daughter, is an early, high-toned version of this story; Wes Craven borrowed its plot for “The Last House on the Left,” and it has been called the “basic template” for the rape-revenge movie.
Generally, in the movies that have used this template, the mission of the male protagonist is the story’s engine; the woman is a mere victim whose debasement or death triggers his character development. (She has been “fridged,” as they say.) It is not an accident that the history of the rape-revenge movie, from sleazy exploitation flicks to revered classics, is dominated by male filmmakers. That’s true of much of cinematic history, of course, but, also, the genre lends itself to gritty accounts of good guys who are morally required to do bad things in the service of justice—a kind of story that mostly men, I think, want to tell. Good-guy hagiography.
There is something else happening in “Promising Young Woman,” something more curious, and more complex. The proxy vigilante is (also) a woman. And, though Nina never appears, the imprint she has left on her grieving friend dominates every scene. Cassie, Nina’s avenging angel, has been transformed by her loss; flattened by grief, she is prostrate before its altar. And she and Nina can be read as a single woman, split; the shared trauma, the back-and-forth of twoness and oneness in their mutable identities, suggests a metaphorical sort of quantum entanglement, “spooky action at a distance,” as Einstein put it. Nina is “like a daughter” to Cassie’s parents. She and Cassie have friendship necklaces with a single pendant broken in two, each its own distinct object but incomplete without a second wearer. When Cassie confronts a former friend of Nina’s who did not believe her, the dialogue is written such that they could be talking about Cassie or Nina. Trauma is contagious, infectious, violent. It blurs and—more importantly—it ruptures. Watching “Promising Young Woman,” I recalled a phrase from a piece by Doreen St. Félix, about the book “Know My Name,” by Chanel Miller, whose sexual assault became a national story, and who was referred to as “Emily Doe” in the media. St. Félix describes Miller’s subsequent coping strategy as a “bifurcating of the self.”
There is a video of Nina’s rape, and Cassie watches it. But Fennell doesn’t show us the footage. We only see Cassie’s face, contorting in pain and shock, as she witnesses its violence. Here, the victim and vigilante collapse together into a single entity, Cassie-and-Nina, who always wanted to be doctors and never will.
Much has been made about the film’s ending, the final way in which “Promising Young Woman” sets itself apart from its lineage. Cassie infiltrates the bachelor party of Nina’s rapist disguised as a stripper. She ties him up, tells him what she knows, tries to get him to admit to what he’s done, and threatens to cut Nina’s name into his skin. He breaks free of his restraints and smothers Cassie with a pillow. It takes an agonizingly long time for her to die. It’s as brutal as watching the rape we’ve never been witness to.
When the best man stumbles into the bedroom the next morning, he can hardly believe it. “You killed the stripper at your bachelor party? What is this, the nineties?” It’s a comedy premise played straight: the unfunny joke of the dead sex worker and boys-will-be-boys, if the murdered woman was given the luxury of a backstory. Because so much of the film hinges on plotty misdirection, you keep waiting for Cassie’s hand to twitch, for her to pull off the pillow and sit up like Hannibal Lecter in the ambulance and enact her revenge. But, as the best man and groom-to-be have an emotional moment, she does not move. Her body just lies there while the best man clutches his friend’s weeping face and promises that it’s going to be all right. In the next scene, they’re burning her body in the wilderness; the best man kicks her manicured hand into the flames.
But then the film continues, and we see Cassie’s plan unfold: her death is the engine for overdue consequences. Her parents report her missing; a lawyer receives an “in the event of my disappearance” package in the mail; the police arrive at the wedding and arrest the groom for her murder; Ryan gets a series of playful “scheduled messages” sent from the past. The story is over, Cassie tells him. Cassie-and-Nina is, are, whole once again. Triumph, but not the kind you’d expect.
The victorious arrival of law enforcement is, perhaps, the one place that the film truly falters, with its suggestion that the police and the legal system are likely mechanisms for a rape victim to find real justice. The movie’s devastating but plot-tidy ending calls to mind Carol Clover’s description, in “Men, Women, and Chain Saws,” of the conclusion of “The Accused,” in which a late-arriving witness comes through and provides legal and narrative closure. Clover calls it “pure Pollyannaism.” But “Promising Young Woman” is not quite so simple, premising its neat twist on the hard fact of Cassie’s murder. Rape does not go away when you refuse to say it. Euphemisms are death.
And so is revenge, in the end. “Revenge is the place the fracturing mind goes when it is trying to stay whole,” Emma Copley Eisenberg has written. “That is the paradox of it, because revenge often means doing—even justified and righteous things—from which it is very unlikely you will return whole.” And isn’t that what we know to be true? Rape revenge not as dark comedy or edgy thriller or triumphant drama but as self-immolation—submission to the impossibility of wholeness without destruction, addressed and unaddressed sexual violence as annihilating force. It’s not optimistic or cathartic or satisfying; it’s a way to ask a question: How many women—one, two, fifty, ten thousand, more—will we sacrifice to the ravenous maw of men’s promise?
